The super-rich are going on sabbatical. It turns out having bucket-loads of money can be stressful, leading some of the world’s richest people to take sabbaticals or even gap years to escape the pressure of managing their businesses or personal fortunes.

Tom Barber, founder of boutique London travel agency Original Travel, said so many super-rich customers had asked his firm to arrange bespoke trips ranging in duration from one to 12 months that his firm is launching a special division dedicated to sabbaticals for the 1%.

“It’s a huge trend,” Barber said. “The wealthy are looking for an escape. Often they want to get some sense of a back-to-basics lifestyle and learn the skills of our ancestors, like how to hunt and cook their own food.

“For others, it’s ‘braggability’. They want to use their money to open doors that normal people can’t and to tell their friends all about it,” he said. “If you’re in the 0.01%, you are going to be a competitive type of person.”

These are no ordinary holidays. Recent trips Barber’s firm has arranged include snow leopard spotting in India, living with the Sān people in Botswana and diving with sharks in the ‘sardine run’ off the coast of South Africa.

Barber said his company had arranged 80 sabbatical trips lasting at least a month over the past six years, with a significant jump in bookings over the past year. High-end travel agents in the US have reported a similar trend and also launched bespoke sabbatical booking services.

Barber said most sabbaticals are a month or two, but he had arranged a 12-month gap year for a 45-year-old billionaire who had recently sold his start-up and wanted “some time to reconnect with this family”. The trip cost well in excess of £1m.

The family visited 65 countries – from Mauritius to Bhutan, Antarcticaand Greenland. “The guy was burnt out,” Barber said. “He wanted to see the world, get back to basics a bit and most importantly see more of his kids, who he hadn’t seen so much of when he was working to sell his company.”

A team of agents helped arrange the trip for the billionaire, including applying for visas and fixing up local guides in each country. Flights were the one thing Barber’s team didn’t need to worry about, as the family’s pilot flew them on their private jet.

Included on the family’s itinerary was tracking the elusive snow leopards of the Ladakh in north-west India. “They really wanted to see them, but didn’t want to wait there for 10 days and not actually see a snow leopard,” Barber said. So his team came up with a plan – they hired a team of local spotters and a helicopter to whisk the family from their luxury encampment the minute the leopards were spotted.

The family also spent time with the Sān indigenous hunter-gatherers in Botswana, where they learned how to hunt and cook their own food, and live without money. They also dived the sardine run off the coast of South Africa, where billions of sardines migrate up the east coast attracting huge numbers of predators, including sharks and dolphins.

They were joined in the dive by a professional documentary team, who helped the family film their experience. “They then showed them how to edit the rushes and make their own mini-film,” Barber said. “An overwhelming element is the super-rich want to learn new skills. Sitting on a superyacht in the sun is pretty old-school these days – people want to have adventures and learn new things.”

As well as arranging the visas, logistics, guides and activities, Barber’s firm also built a website for the family so that their friends back home could keep tabs on them.

Barber said planning for the trip started with: “A big map of the world in our conference room in Battersea [south London]. Our experts put pins in where they thought some of the best options were and we put a list of suggestions to the family.”

He declined to identify the family, but said the father who instigated the trip was an “extremely nice, humble, pretty unassuming guy who happens to have untold billions”.

Barber said the super-rich often take their families on sabbatical in order to show them “how real people live” and to learn the power and importance of money. “They want their children to see some real life, but in a safe and secure way,” he said.

The super-rich sabbatical trend has also been spotted by high-end travel agents in the US. Jack Ezon, president of Ovation Travel Group in New York, said the number of sabbaticals had “grown exponentially in the last couple of years”. He said his firm arranges 50-60 sabbaticals about a month long in a year, and 5-10 whole gap years.

“It’s a way to restart or refresh your life,” he said.

Zachary Rabinor and family Photograph: Zachary Rabinor

Ezon said many of his clients booking long sabbaticals are entrepreneurs who have sold their businesses and are looking for a proper break. “It is often tech guys who have floated or sold their companies and are thinking ‘I have a two-year non-compete clause, what am I going to do with my time?’” he said. “For others it is often when their kids are about to go on to college or high school, and they suddenly think ‘I need to really be spending time with them.’”

Zachary Rabinor, an US travel executive living in Mexico, is setting off on a seven-month sabbatical with his wife and two children next month. The family are planning on driving from Punta Arenas, at the very southerly tip of Chile, back to their home in Mexico.

“We’ve shipped our vehicle down to the very south of Chile, and fitted it out for an extreme adventure, with a tent on the roof and full suspension,” Rabinor said. First the family will head to Antarctica, before driving up the Andes, stopping off to trek to Machu Picchu in Peru and to dive the Galápagos Islands.

“My wife and I decided that we had to do this now, to spend some intensive time with our kids before it was too late,” he said. “My eldest is about to turn 13 and the youngest is nearly 10.”

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The kids will miss more than half a year’s schooling. Rabinor and his wife, who both have experience teaching, plan to home school or – “van school”, as he puts it – the children.

Children’s education is often a stumbling block in people’s sabbatical plans, but there are a number of ways around the problem if you have the money, said Ezon. “We have a roster of teachers and retired teachers that we can suggest to families to take with them on their trips,” he said.

He said long trips can easily become very expensive, but “these are very, very wealthy people and they can afford it”. “It could be a couple of million dollars to take your family around the world with a teacher in tow.”

The past decade has seen an explosion of craft beer breweries in the US as small businesses tap into growing demand for food and drink rooted in local traditions and ingredients.

Nowhere is this consumer movement more apparent, and unique, than at Bow & Arrow brewery in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The first and only brewery in the US owned by Native American women, it has carved a space in the predominantly white and male-dominated industry by showcasing elements of their tribal identities, communities and ingredients through beer.

“We have been very intentional about highlighting our special place in the south-west,” said Bow & Arrow’s co-founder and CEO, Shyla Sheppard, sitting with her fellow founder Missy Begay inside the high-ceilinged brewery. On one wall was a mounted cardboard sculpture of a buffalo bust – on another, a star-spangled Pendleton blanket set near a huge photograph of Monument Valley.

Shyla Sheppard: ‘People take for granted what’s in the backyard.’ Photograph: Don James

According to Sheppard, this regional and indigenized aesthetic is present at every level of the Bow & Arrow business, from the art on the walls to the brewery’s “hop arrow” logo – symbolizing the cultural significance of the arrowhead to many Native American tribes – to the “beer and beer names”. The menu features selections such as Bolos and Bling (a play on the bolo tie of New Mexico and the jewelry for which Native Americans are known in the south-west), and Denim Tux, a playful reference to popular south-western apparel as well as a nod the color of the main ingredient, local blue corn, that is used in the beer.

Women have stopped us and said thank you for creating this space

Shyla Sheppard

For Sheppard, an economist and former social impact investor from the Fort Berthold reservation in North Dakota, and Begay, a physician from the Navajo Nation, the use of local ingredients is another way to celebrate the region.

“People take for granted what’s in the backyard,” said Sheppard, explaining Bow & Arrow’s unique use of additives such as New Mexican hops, sumac berries, blue corn, regionally sourced malt and Navajo tea, an earthy, herbal plant used by the local Hopi, Pueblo and the Navajo Nation. “It was the drink of the summer,” said Begay, recalling days in the Canyon de Chelly region drinking cold homemade Navajo tea.

Hops, among the essential ingredients in beer, have long been used by Native Americans for their medicinal properties. “They recognized the bitter aspect of [hops] as an antiseptic. That kind of naturally led us to use Navajo tea,” said Begay, noting how the medical properties of the Navajo tea leaves led them to “a curiosity that transformed into this unique beer”.

Bow and Arrow’s neon facade. Photograph: Mike Graham for the Guardian

The sumac berries used in Bow & Arrow’s Way Out West-Sumacbeer, meanwhile, are traditionally used by south-western tribes to make a refreshing drink.

More recently, Bow & Arrow began experimenting with wild yeasts found around Albuquerque.

“We have been trying to capture different native cultures in order to ferment our beer,” said the head Brewer, Ted O’Hanlan, explaining the process of putting wort (ground malt and water) outside to capture different microbes. “Depending on the moisture or wind in the air, you’re going to get a different native culture.”

“Incorporating local ingredients is part of our bigger plan, and I feel like we have just scratched the surface,” explained Begay.“We want to get to the point that not only are the additives locally sourced but also yeast – the thing that makes beer beer – is from this area.”.

Emilia Salas holds Navajo tea. She was part of the first graduating class at Central New Mexico Community College with a degree in brewing. Photograph: Mike Graham for the Guardian

For Sheppard and Begay, who live just down the street from Bow & Arrow, the emphasis on place extends to a community-centered approach to daily operations.

“We are playing a part in creating this healthy ecosystem of businesses,” said Sheppard, who as CEO has taken pains to support local businesses by hosting local food trucks and volunteering space for neighborhood association meetings, not-for-profit fundraisersand pop-up markets.

According to Sheppard and Begay, the importance of community informed the design of the space itself. “Design can in many ways influence behavior,” said Sheppard, referring to the rows of communal tables set up beer-hall style. Begay added: “We both grew up on the rez and our social and community events are very much elbow-to-elbow with your family, friends and community.”

That sensibility includes providing a safe and inclusive space for all – something at times lacking in the predominantly white and male beer industry.

Ted O’Hannan, the head brewer, checks the beers as they brew. Photograph: Mike Graham for the Guardian

“You may find our brewery is more diverse than others,” said Sheppard. “Women have stopped us and said thank you for creating this space.”

Looking to the future, Sheppard and Begay see Bow & Arrow as part of a growing movement of businesses owned by native women. This year, the brewery hosted pre-conference kickoff event for the first annual Native Women’s Business Summit.

“To pack a room with Native women businesspeople was amazing,” said Sheppard of the nearly 150 people who attended. “I feel like there is becoming this critical mass where there is more conversation and dialogue and desire to support each other. To be a part of that is something we are very proud of.”

Paula Quazi is discussing detergent. The former vice-president of marketing for Unilever Europe, claims there hasn’t been the innovation or product development you would expect for a sector of this size (the laundry detergent market is worth £1.7bn in the UK), and accuses brands of just “repackaging up the existing offering in a slightly more jazzy way.

“The trend is now to separate out all the components in a detergent capsule, add colour to the separate parts and put them in a separate chamber of a capsule. The product is exactly the same but now it looks different so they can claim it’s an innovation.”

However she has reason to be critical. Earlier this year, Quazi and her business partner, Nick Green (also ex-Unilever) launched their own detergent, Smol, to challenge the likes of Ariel, Persil and Fairy.

They were inspired by the model of the Dollar Shave Club in the US, which sells razors and other grooming products via a subscription service. Smol’s detergent capsules are delivered directly to customers’ home by Royal Mail, in packaging designed to fit through a letter box. It is offering subscribers a starter pack, then additional deliveries for a fixed price.

The laundry sector isn’t an easy one to break into, says Quazi. It’s dominated by three big players, Unilever, Procter & Gamble and RB, and the major brands rely heavily on their relationship with the retailers and high street. They are therefore hoping their model of selling directly to the consumer, and bypassing retailers, is a way in.

The aim is also to meet the consumer demand for convenience. “The dominant players haven’t been thinking about consumers for years they’ve been too busy fighting one another for share,” says Quazi. “People’s lives are so busy that they don’t want to have to think about remembering to buy washing detergent.”

Paula Quazi and Nick Green, founders of Smol

To say there hasn’t been any innovation in the sector, however, isn’t entirely true. The Ecoegg Laundry Egg lasts for over 50 washes before you need to replace the eco-friendly cleaning pellets inside it. Meanwhile Laundrapp, which collects and drops off laundry and dry cleaning, has experienced rapid growth since launching in 2014. “Laundrapp seems to be a nice idea for people who can afford serviced laundry offers. However, we believe most people will continue washing their laundry at home,” says Quazi.

As both Quazi and Green had worked in the laundry market sector, they had a good idea how the marketing and branding worked and Quazi’s chemistry degree helped when it came to deciphering the right chemical formulations to use. Laundry detergents are, says Quazi, complex products to create, involving high end product development, skilled scientists and costly manufacturing processes.

They spent almost three years developing Smol and had some sleepless nights along the way. Quazi says: “Both Nick and I are very entrepreneurial but it took us two and a half years to get the product right before we launched, so it was a bit of a rollercoaster.”

They poured all their savings and resources into developing the product. “Smol was and is a full-time job for both of us, in the early days we took the decision to use our savings to get the brand off the ground. We worked in a lab with support from very skilled scientists,” says Quazi.

They were keen to reduce the chemical content of the detergent without affecting performance.“That was part of the dilemma in the early days,” says Quazi. “We have fewer chemicals than equivalent capsules in the market.” It in’t an eco product, however.

Dr. Karen Correia da Silva, senior social scientist at Canvas8, a business insights firm, says consumers are becoming much more savvy about eco products. “Making more environmentally conscious decisions when it comes to cleaning products and practices has become increasingly important as many consumers continue their quest to live and consume ethically. In cleaning and laundry specifically, health and environmental concerns are gaining influence over buying decisions.”

However, she adds that performance is still the main factor for many consumers. “Sustainable products are rarely market leaders. Performance still reigns supreme when it comes to consumer choice,” says Correia da Silva.

Aside from the subscription model, Quazi claims that Smol is different because it is cheaper. A regular pack costs£3.85 for 24 capsules (16p a wash).

An open pack of Smol liquid detergent tabs

The company currently has around 50 staff working remotely in customer service roles, most of whom are mums, working from home . “Most of our customers are, sadly, women (as they are still doing the majority of the laundry) so it’s important that the people who work for us understand and appreciate our product,” says Quazi.

It’s early days for the business, and it has major competition on its hands. Earlier this year established brand Ariel launched a huge £10.5m marketing push.

Quazi argues that the relationship between brands and consumers has changed. “People want a two-way relationship, one which revolves around trust, listening,” she says. “And the fact [is] current brands are not meeting the needs of consumers.”

There’s no doubt that London has firmly established itself as a leading digital hub. Last year, the turnover by its digital tech businesses was £64.1bn, the highest of any cluster in the UK, and 40% of new technology startups were based in the capital. Startups and investors work in close proximity, and there’s plenty of advice for ambitious entrepreneurs. “You could go every single night of the week to an event on how to pitch for funding,” says Mike Jackson, entrepreneur success director at Tech Nation, speaking at a recent Guardian roundtable in Liverpool, supported by Cisco.

But London is only part of the UK’s tech story, and the discussion focused on the future of the burgeoning tech scenes in the north of England.

While there are distinct advantages to being based outside the capital (such as a lower cost of living), businesses are still hamstrung by four primary problems, Jackson told participants. These structural weaknesses outside London are:

Access to capital.

Access to growth space [not for small startups, but office space for businesses that are growing to 20-, 50-plus employees].

Access to second-generation mentorship – people who have “done the journey” and are giving back the benefits of their experience to younger tech companies.

Jackson suggested a lack of potential investors willing to look too far outside of London was a big problem. “Capital is an issue for almost every [tech] cluster outside London,” he said. David Woods, co-founder and chief operating officer of Liverpool-based LivingLens, a video intelligence platform, agreed, adding that he found investors in London to be less risk averse: “90% of our funding has come from London. We had to go down there to raise money.”

How do you go from a mid-six-figure salary [in London] to a high-five-figure salary in Newcastle?

A willingness for schemes and investors alike to think more long-term was also needed, according to venture capital expert Will Clark from Mercia Technologies. “Whether it’s a government-backed scheme or not, it’s got to take a longer-term view,” he said. “One of the most successful businesses that has come out of this region – Blue Prism in Newton Le Willows – took 12 years to come to fruition.”

However, finance isn’t the only issue holding businesses back, according to Ian Finch, co-founder of digital agency Mando and chair of BIMA North West. He said companies in the north were still struggling to make the journey from small startup or sole trader to bigger business, which could partly be down to a lack of second-generation tech entrepreneurs able and willing to pass on the benefits of their experience.

Recruitment, on the other hand, isn’t a challenge, according to Andy Cooper, co-founder of Draw & Code, a tech studio in Liverpool. He said a more affordable lifestyle, including cheaper housing, was attracting tech workers to northern cities. “We don’t have any issue attracting people to the business. Half of our staff come from outside the region, from London or from around the world. If you’re young and you’re in your 20s and in London then it’s a great place to be, but you can’t save any money when you want to start a family, so what do you do then?”

Sarat Pediredla, CEO of Newcastle-based Hedgehog Lab, a tech consultancy, said that there were now “hundreds and hundreds of developers in Leeds” thanks to Sky Bet, whose headquarters are based in the city. However, wage demands are a challenge for northern companies when recruiting senior staff from London. He said: “I remember having interviews for senior leadership team members. Their salary expectation is completely unrealistic for Newcastle. How do you go from a mid-six-figure salary [in London] to a high-five-figure salary in Newcastle? Even though that’s comfortable in a place like Newcastle, there’s that mental block to reducing your wage.”

Employers need to recruit graduates before they move to London, as it’s harder to attract people back once they’ve put down roots elsewhere, said Pediredla.

From left: Mike Jackson, Vimla Appadoo and John Johnson. Photograph: Antonio Franco for the Guardian

Some participants argued that being based outside of London makes it easier to collaborate with other businesses. The more “open” northern attitude, and the smaller nature of its towns and cities, gives it a distinct advantage over the capital, said Vimla Appadoo, service designer at FutureGov. “Because there are smaller cities connected across the north of England you get a real sense of community. You get to understand what’s going on across the region. London is too big to get under the skin of that. Across the north you can know all the startups and all the founders, and what the events are – and you can get involved.”

Collaboration has become increasingly important in the tech industry, said Finch. “The only way to deliver value to customers is to do your thing and do it the best in the world. You can’t do multiple things well, so the way digital has gone you have to collaborate. The people who’ve been slow to collaborate are dying off.”

The cornerstone of Liverpool’s digital industries is Baltic Creative, a community interest company founded in 2009 that has become one of the fastest-growing tech clusters in the UK. Managing director Mark Lawler said it was the hub’s “unique proposition” of reinvesting profits back into tenants, their property and the wider sector that had made it such a desirable destination, with a waiting list and 260 enquiries for space there in the past nine months. Lawler is now looking to replicate the model elsewhere in the north-west.

When asked where they saw the tech scene in Liverpool and the north in one year’s time, the panel felt optimistic, although Finch pointed out that the prospect of Brexit was causing “ripple effects” of nervousness. “I see in our customer base procurement cycles taking longer. We’re negotiating a fourth cycle with one of our customers at the minute – they’ve been a customer for 10 years – and the contract has gone from 100 pages to 180. It’s just stuff – GDPR this and commercial risk that. I think business is just more nervous, and when you’re nervous you need to feel safe.”

John Johnson, CTO at Cisco, added: “I’m really positive. We look at investment in the north now it’s increasing at pace, we can see there’s a great future ahead.”

Simba’s founder, Steve Reid can’t resist. “It’s a traditionally sleepy sector,” he chuckles, describing the mattress industry. Though perhaps it isn’t nowadays, thanks in part to organisations like his. Reid is the co-founder of Simba, a company that calls itself “Europe’s leading high-tech sleep brand”. Launched by Reid and co-founders James Cox and Andrew McClements in February 2016, in just two years it has sold more than 200,000 mattresses, received tens of thousands of five-star reviews and a Product of the Year award.

Simba is one of the “bed in a box” brands – which include the likes of Casper, an American company, and Eve, a British startup – that have changed the way we buy mattresses, and in the process, stolen a 5% slice of the market from the established players. It’s a trend that shows no signs of slowing: predictions see the newcomers holding 20% of the market in the next three years.

Where shopping for a mattress once meant a trip to a showroom to lie on multiple beds in a shop or department store, having to make your mind up after a few awkward moments under the glare of showroom lights, the bed in a box idea aims to make the whole experience more convenient. Simba’s mattress – like others based on the same concept – comes compressed in a box, delivered to your door and easily carried into your bedroom.

And unsurprisingly the bigger, more established players in the industry are taking notice: the bed in the box concept has since been emulated by Hyde & Sleep, a brand from bed specialist Dreams.

But for Reid, the method of delivery isn’t the only way the newcomers are shaking things up. He argues that there’s too much choice and unnecessary confusion when it comes to mattress shopping, with consumers feeling like they need to find “the one”. He claims the technology behind Simba’s mattress means it’s effectively a “one model fits all” creation.

“When we looked at the mattress sector, and the way that the incumbents were selling them, it smacked of needing disruption,” says Reid. “It needed someone to come along and say: ‘It doesn’t need to be that way’.

“That old traditional mentality of popping down to your local bed store or department store has changed dramatically,” says Reid. “If you walk into any mattress showroom, you have got a sea of white – it’s a bland experience, it’s a sea of products that are very similar because the incumbents in the sector haven’t had to innovate their products. And if there’s no one looking to disrupt and say ‘that’s not right’, it continues.”

Simba, which sells its mattresses via retailers including John Lewis and Furniture Village, as well as through its own website, is being backed by Richard Reed, co-founder of Innocent Drinks and Richard Goldstein, of the family that founded Superdrug. To date it has raised £58.5m investment.

But it has plenty of competition, with several other businesses such as Casper and Leesa working on a similar basis – direct sales to the consumer, delivery straight to your door, and the option to return the mattress if it doesn’t work out.

Mattresses are big business at the moment – it’s thought there could be as many as 100 boxed mattress companies in the US. So why the sudden awakening when it comes to investing in our sleep? “A decade ago, it was: ‘Are you tired or are you not tired?’,” says Reid. “The awareness of sleep as a part of our health has rapidly expanded, and when it comes to that buying decision it’s much more considered in terms of the benefits you’re going to get. ”

Simba currently uses the largest bank of body profiling data in the world (10 million people) to inform its designs which include the five layers of spring and foam within its Simba Hybrid mattress, and the Nasa-backed thermal technology in its pillow to keep sleepers at the right temperature.

But like any disruptive company, it needs to keep innovating.“For us, you can’t bring out a product and expect it to stay ahead of the curve.”Future plans for the “sleep experience” factor in everything from light to temperature; from an in-house nutritionist advising on what people should eat to “power down” at night, to a resident psychologist who helps with product development. This may well be an extension of Simba’s brand into the lifestyle space. After all, the “holistic sleep experience” goes far beyond selling you something to lie on, says Reid.

Caitlin Young is one of millions of teenagers and 20-somethings who are shaking up the fashion industry by digging out their parents’ cast-offs, raiding charity shops and scanning boot sales to build mini businesses online.

Young picks up 1990s and “Y2K” early 2000s “vintage” gear from charity shops and jumble sales and then styles or customises them for her 22,500 followers on Depop, a fast-growing social media app which combines the image creation of Instagram with a digital version of market trader bargaining.

“People in my family say, ‘You sell used shoes?,’ like they are so disgusted, but everyone I know buys vintage. It’s what people do now,” says Young. “It pays for my life,” adds the animation student, who sells up to £2,000-worth of secondhand clothing a month online.

Caitlin Young: ‘People in my family say, you sell used shoes? – like they are so disgusted.’ Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian

Young and other online clothing sellers are shrugging off the trends shovelled out by mainstream brands and high street chains and making thousands of pounds by trading vintage trainers, fluorescent hoodies and high-waisted jeans their parents wore to raves in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Founded in 2011, Depop now has 10m users, most of whom are in the UK, and takes more than £300m ($400m) a year in sales, a figure that has doubled year on year. Its British shoppers, 80% of whom are aged 13 to 24, buy an average of 20,000 items a day. It reckons that hundreds of its top sellers make more than £150,000 a year selling online.

Depop has caught on to a trend in which secondhand is no longer second best, along with other online marketplaces including US-based Thredup, Poshmark and Grailed, which trade in a more social way than the more established eBay and Gumtree. The online fashion specialist Asos’s marketplace section includes vintage boutiques, while British startup Student High Street holds sellers’ events at universities.

A study in the US by Thredup suggested there was a 25% rise in the number of women prepared to buy secondhand in 2017 compared with the year before. It predicted 15% annual growth in the market over the next few years. compared with just 2% for the overall fashion sales.

Thredup estimates that secondhand clothes now make up 6% of respondents’ wardrobes, double that of 10 years ago, and that proportion could almost double again to 11% by 2027.

“It’s almost a dark market,” says Lorna Hall, the head of insight at the trend forecasting firm WGSN. “Money is coming out of the mainstream market because of this way of shopping, particularly in Generation Z [under 25s].”

“People love that you can easily search for people selling on Depop who are close to you, pick up your purchase and avoid postage costs,” she says.

Simon Beckerman founded Depop in Italy in 2011 but moved the company to London three years ago after winning $8m in backing from Balderton Capital, the UK-based investment firm which has previously backed Betfair and Figleaves.

Beckerman told Artefact magazine his initial goal was to aim for “young designers and cool collectors … but we discovered this world of girls who want to sell their whole wardrobe and I didn’t imagine there would be such a need for that. Ebay is complicated, long and, if you want to sell something for £5, it just doesn’t work. So having Depop as a social marketplace with chat is better and all the girls love it”.

Depop has about 10m users. Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian

The 2008 recession sparked a change in attitude that has been embraced by young people who want to be fashionable but are concerned about the environmental impact of throwing away clothes after only a few wears.

“We are living in an age of DIY and the rise of being able to create your own platform,” says Depop seller Thidarat Kaha, who sells about £6,000 of clothes a month to her 44,000 followers. “The mainstream market used to be just buying something from Topshop, and someone else would have that same dress.

“The magic of this product is it is usually one on one. No one else is going to get anything else exactly the same as what you just purchased. And young people are more conscious about the future of the planet. Recycling and buying vintage clothing is contributing to to consuming clothes in a better way.”

Depop is aiming to tap into that change in mentality to quadruple the size of the business in the next three or four years.

In total, $40m has now been ploughed into the company by investors betting on that future, including Octopus Ventures, the company that backed Graze and Gym Box and Creandum, that backed Spotify and the payment tech firm iZettle.

“We are so small compared to the overall size of the market, the potential is huge,” says Maria Raga, Depop’s chief executive. “Depop is about people selling stuff that is good quality, inspirational and that is down to a lot of creativity.”

Young, who began by making and selling clothes to friends at school and used to sell vintage items on eBay before joining Depop as a student, says she has had such a good response to her customised clothes that she is now considering launching her own clothing brand. “I started it to keep me going while I’m studying, but I just love it,” she says.

With 170 miles of Mediterranean coastline and an estimated 300 days of sunshine a year, Israel’s tourism industry is booming, with record numbers visiting in 2017. But in Tel Aviv, it’s the startups that have got the business world talking.

According to the 2018 Global Startup Ecosystem Report, Tel Aviv has the highest number of startups per capita in the world, and the highest investment of GDP in research and development (R&D). It’s also one of the top-performing cities for global connections and global market reach, and has been highlighted by Compass and Fortune magazine as one of the best places in the world to start a business.

Big ticket acquisitions by some of the world’s largest companies have given homegrown entrepreneurs the confidence to dream big. Google acquired Waze, a traffic and navigation app, for $1.3bn in 2013, beating off competition from Apple and Facebook. That sale was followed by deals to buy the autonomous-driving startup Mobileye by Intel, for $15.3bn; meanwhile Israeli taxi app Gett isvalued at $1.4bn. Tel Aviv is also home to hundreds of venture capital funds, acceleration programmes and co-working spaces, spread across the city’s 20 square miles.

Uzi Levine, co-founder, Waze. Photograph: Uzi Levine

“The startup scene was very good even back then,” says Waze co-founder and serial entrepreneur Uzi Levine about launching the company in 2008. “But the ecosystem has matured a lot over the past decade, with experienced angel investors, higher aspirations, and an ecosystem that embraces change.”

Experts say the Israeli government has been pivotal in kickstarting the industry, not least with tax cuts in the mid-1980s; the creation of the Yozma programme, a $100m (£75m) investment company that created a homegrown venture capital sector, in 1993; and a high-tech incubators programme. Yozma’s founder, Yigal Erlich, had previously been Israel’s chief scientist. In 2016, that office was rebranded as Israel’s Innovation Authority (IIA), and supported 1,115 projects of 650 companies, awarding average grants of £290,000 (1.4m ILS).

The government has also been responsible for reducing corporation tax for tech companies, from 25% to 6-12% (depending on the nature of the business), and removing bureaucratic obstacles to encourage hi-tech mergers – and it has stated its commitment to increase the number of skilled personnel employed in the sector from 270,000 to 500,000 in the next 10 years. Part of that drive will entail looking internationally for talent, targeting underrepresented local populations – such as Israeli Arabs, ultra-Orthodox Jews and women – and initiatives such as the innovation visa pilot for foreign entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurial education is also an important part of the infrastructure. The Tel Aviv university IDC Herzliya has been running the Zell Entrepreneurship Program, on which 25 students create a business in the final year of their degrees, for the past 18 years. In 2017, it also launched a BA in entrepreneurship for the first time. Dr Yossy Maaravi, vice-dean of Adelson Entrepreneurship School at IDC Herzliya, agrees much of Israel’s entrepreneurial spirit comes down to culture.

“In Hebrew there’s a word – chutzpah – that means ‘positive rudeness’,” he says. “Approaching people you don’t know and asking them for a favour or asking them to connect you to someone you need … in Israel people do this easily, even if they’re not entrepreneurs. This is important to deliver ideas, perspectives, and criticism – and we have a good network of Jewish people throughout the world.”

The size of the domestic market in a country of only 8 million people has led to many entrepreneurs in Tel Aviv thinking internationally from the start. Ruth Pollakine Baruchi, who launched MyndYou – which uses machine learning to personalise care for older people – with her husband Itay in 2016, says its main market is already the US. It’s an international perspective that is supported locally – the company has received a $900,000 grant from the Bird Foundation, supported by the Israeli and US governments, to encourage collaboration between companies from the two countries. MyndYou has since announced a partnership with a large US rehabilitation company, called Genesis Rehab Services.

But Pollakine Baruchi, who has lived in Tel Aviv for the past 18 years, says she loves being based in the city. “There’s a good energy … a creative atmosphere of doing things and being eager to do things, which I like being part of … and in some ways it’s easy to recruit people. There’s a lot of talent in Tel Aviv.”

MyndYou is based in SOSA, a hub for tech startups in Tel Aviv, that aims to connect big corporations in traditional industries, such as insurance, finance, energy, construction and manufacturing, with Israeli entrepreneurs. Israel is proving increasingly attractive to those seeking external innovation. According to Forbes, more than 300 multinationals, including Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon, have set up research and development centres in the country.

“These companies come to Israel looking for solutions,” says SOSA chief executive Uzi Scheffer. “We create a lot of IT [but] don’t really have the market, so we are creating an export-oriented industry.”

But Scheffer believes the startup nation needs to become a scale-up nation. In 2018, the IIA announced it would provide government guarantees for bank loans to startups to encourage companies to remain in Israel, rather than seek foreign investment and move abroad. Startups will also be able to pilot technology using state-owned infrastructure, such as the postal system, electricity board and national social security agency. Building bigger businesses at home, Scheffer says, would have resounding benefits for the economy.

“If you’re a serial entrepreneur and money isn’t the issue anymore, you might want to go further and see how big you can grow the company,” he says. “You might have motivations for the good of the country and the good of the economy – I think this is a natural evolvement of an ecosystem that is perhaps three decades old.”

Anyone can track a Venmo user’s purchase history and glean a detailed profile – including their drug deals, eating habits and arguments – because the payment app lacks default privacy protections.

This was the finding of a Berlin-based researcher, Hang Do Thi Duc, who analysed the more than 200 million public Venmo transactions made in 2017. Her aim was to highlight the privacy risk from using a seemingly innocuous peer-to-peer app, and encourage people to change their privacy settings.

By accessing the data through a public application programming interface, Do Thi Duc was able to the names of every user, along with the dates of every transaction and the message sent with the payment. This allowed her to explore the lives of unsuspecting Venmo users and learn “an alarming amount about them”.

Venmo is unusual because it combines social media with financial transaction. It’s hard to gauge expectations of privacy

Do Thi Duc showcases the level of personal data exposed through Venmo through her project website “Public by Default”, named because when anyone makes a payment through the app, it is public unless that person has locked down their privacy settings. Here she has honed in on five individual users, including a man who sells cannabis in Santa Barbara and a pair of lovers who pass money between each other accompanied by flirting, arguing, apologies and threats.

In the case of the cannabis seller, Do Thi Duc could see 920 incoming payments throughout 2017, accompanied by messages including words like “CBD” (an abbreviation of cannabidiol, one of the active ingredients in cannabis) “delivery”, “order” or emojis depicting trees, which have become a common shorthand for marijuana. She could also see that the dealer appeared to hire a second person, making 19 payments to them throughout the year with references to cannabis sales.

Do Thi Duc was also able to find entire conversations between couples who may not have realised that their comments were also public by default. “Please leave me alone,” said the woman, who Do Thi Duc refers to as Susana.

“I just love you. I’m sad that you don’t understand,” replies the man.

In a later exchange, he says: “It’s pretty damn clear that you were using me all along. Took me a while to figure that out.” The next morning, he’s repentant. “I’m sorry. I take everything I said back.”

Messages sent between lovers through Venmo. Photograph: Public By Default / Hang Do Thi Duc

Do Thi Duc also examined a user who runs a successful food cart selling mangos, chicharrones, and other snacks near the University of Santa Barbara campus. The vendor made more than 8,000 transactions in 2017, and his most frequent customer, who Do Thi Duc refers to as Cecile, visited the truck 34 times around the same time each week.

“While Cecile’s hunger being public knowledge may not seem a big deal to you, many people have reason to keep their whereabouts private. Victims of domestic abuse, for example. I had to wonder if these hungry students understood that they were broadcasting their location with every bite,” wrote Do Thi Duc on her website.

A young female user, nicknamed the YOLO-ist, made 965 transactions for sodas, alcoholic drinks, fast food and sweets in eight months.

Transactions between one junk food fan and her three friends. Photograph: Public By Default / Hang Do Thi Duc

“She’s really enjoying unhealthy drinks and food. I could imagine insurance companies might want to look at her data and make judgements about her health,” Do Thi Duc said.

Although she had access to their full real names, Do Thi Duc has not published them.

“I don’t want to attack or expose any particular person,” she told the Guardian. “It’s just about demonstrating the value of your data.”

“Venmo is an unusual app because it combines social media with financial transactions,” said the Electronic Privacy Information Center’s Christine Bannon. “One of those is usually fairly public and one is usually very private, so it’s hard to gauge consumer expectations of privacy.”

Pizza is the most commonly referenced item in Venmo transactions. Photograph: Public By Default / Hang Do Thi Duc

“A lot of the transactions might seem trivial but they can be very revealing. It shows who is in your network, who you went out to eat with, how much rent you pay,” she added.

Do Thi Duc hopes her project encourages people to change the settings of Venmo transactions to make them private by default. Users can also change all their past transactions to private.

“If you’re not a Venmo user, I hope you can look at this project and wonder about all the other platforms you have used,” she said.

A Venmo spokeswoman said that the “safety and privacy” of its users is “one of our highest priorities”.

“Our users trust us with their money and personal information, and we take this responsibility and applicable privacy laws very seriously. Like on other social networks, Venmo users can choose what they want to share on the Venmo public feed.”

There are two things that the streets of Bengaluru are full of: bars and software developers. Take a seat at your watering hole of choice, and it won’t be long before you hear murmurs of startups, VCs and funding at a neighbouring table. This is where the entrepreneurs of Bengaluru (known as Bangalore until November 2014) come to meet – in the coffee shops, bars and restaurants of one of India’s most buzzing cities.

“The tech scene and entrepreneurial spirit in Bengaluru are booming,” says Niketh Sabbineni, a local tech entrepreneur who sold his company, Bookpad, to Yahoo in 2014. Although from the Indian city of Hyderabad, he and his cofounders moved to Bengaluru straight out of college in search of three things: access to entrepreneurs, talent and venture capital.

Niketh Sabbineni, tech entrepreneur.

They’re not alone in choosing it as a base to launch a business. In 2017, the World Economic Forum named it the world’s most dynamic city, based on factors including innovation and technology. (This year it was overtaken by Hyderabad, whose state government has implemented a number of strategies to encourage tech entrepreneurship in the city.)

In May, Walmart beat Amazon to buy out Flipkart, an Indian e-commerce platform based in Bengaluru, for £12bn. It represented a watershed moment for the city’s startup scene. “There hasn’t been a [merger] of that magnitude in India for a tech company,” says Sabbineni. “It’s such an important deal.”

However, the deal is not without its controversy. Yesterday (July 2), small business owners organised protests in several Indian cities, arguing the US giant would skew the field against the traders who depend on FlipKart for their livelihood.

Bengaluru has come a long way since the inception of its IT industry. By 1983, two soon-to-be-giants of India’s fledgling tech industry – Infosys and Wipro – had moved their head offices to Bangalore. Other tech companies followed, growing their businesses around the two firms. This included foreign companies looking to cut costs by employing cheap local developers. The IT outsourcing model was born.

On the one hand, the new jobs raised living standards for Bengaluru’s citizens and made them digital natives, but on the other, it branded the city as a place for cheap labour and one that lacked its own ideas.

Emilien Coquard is a French developer who moved to Bengaluru in 2011, and now runs a software recruitment agency connecting foreign companies with local talent. Since arriving, he’s seen the city’s tech culture change.

Emilien Coquard, developer and headhunter, Bengaluru.

“There’s been a shift from a software-factory model to a startup mindset,” he says. “Twenty years ago people entered IT engineering because that’s where the jobs were – now they’re doing it because they’re genuinely interested in tech, and they’re super excited to be working in software development.”

Coquard uses the example of Dunzo, an app that connects people looking for help with tasks to others who’ll accept payment for completing them, as evidence of the entrepreneurial mindset he believes is deep-rooted in Indian culture. Dunzo started as a WhatsApp group, before the founders turned it into an app. Now, Google has invested £9m in it.

This entrepreneurial spirit is bolstered in Bengaluru by a number of programmes and government initiatives aimed at supporting the city’s tech scene. One is the not-for-profit 10,000 Startups, which connects startups with funders, accelerators and mentors, with a view to building 10,000 new businesses in the city by 2024.

Suresh Jayaraju, a senior director at 10,000 Startups, says that progress has been swift since the business’s inception, four years ago. The incubator is now reorienting its focus away from the quantity of startups and towards their quality, as well as to concentrate on certain sectors. In particular, the programme is focusing on deep tech, such as blockchain, AI and machine learning.

Jayaraju sees this as an area in which Bengaluru could lead the world. While the city lacks the expertise of more established tech hubs, such as San Francisco’s Bay Area or London, everyone across the world is at an early stage in deep tech, so the playing field is level, he says. “Having started with this so early, we can still have an advantage. If we have the right ideas, we can definitely get funded.”

Not unlike some of its more established competitors, Bengaluru’s tech scene struggles with gender equality. In 2017, just 2% of all equity funding that was raised went to startups with a female founder.

“Women staying at home is more of a norm here,” says Hena Mehta, a tech entrepreneur who started a Lean In chapter for Bangalore. “Even educated women who went to college and had jobs before getting married tend to choose to stay at home and raise kids.”

I literally haven’t seen a single women’s resume come through for software engineering

While larger companies often have equality and diversity policies aimed at increasing female representation, startups tend to recruit on a “talent-first” basis. Mehta is currently building a team for her own startup, and says she doesn’t have the resources to find enough female candidates. “I literally haven’t seen a single woman’s resume come through for software engineering,” she says.

While Bengaluru still has some catching up to do, its tech scene is definitely starting to get the attention of the rest of the world – and this time not just as a source of cheap labour.

Vishal Ramaswamy, community lead, Techstars.

Last month, US incubator Techstars launched its first startup accelerator programme in Bengaluru. Vishal Ramaswamy, community lead for Techstars, sees this as a vote of confidence in the city’s entrepreneurial culture.

This is echoed in the reverse brain drain that Ramaswamy says Bengaluru is experiencing. “There are a lot of people of Indian origin who’re in the US – investors, corporate folks, serial entrepreneurs – who’re slowly coming back to India,” he says. “They’ve got US experience and contacts, and they’re coming back to set up businesses in India.”

On the surface, Athens doesn’t seem like the best place to start a business. Since the country’s financial crisis almost a decade ago, about one in five small businesses have folded and unemployment levels still hover around 20%.

However, the local startup scene is enjoying some surprising successes, fuelled by a talented and ambitious young workforce who have found themselves unable to rely on traditional employment routes. These include recruitment software company Workable, which has raised more than €29m (£25.5m) in local and international funding, and ride-hailing app Taxibeat, which was sold to automotive company Daimler for an undisclosed amount last year.

And 2018 may be the best year yet for those with similar goals. The Equifund fund-of-funds programme, which launched this year and is backed by the Greek government, the European Investment Bank and the European Investment Fund, is offering a total of €300m to Greek-founded startups and is aiming to back around 200 early-stage companies over the next five years.

“Before the crisis, if you asked students what they wanted to do, they would have said they wanted to freelance or work in the public sector,” says Giorgos Gatos, sales development director at Workable. “Now, most of them want to start or join a tech company.”

This trend is not unique to Greece – startups have become a fashionable career choice for graduates all over the world. But many in Athens see this as the only option. “There’s no fallback – we don’t have the option of getting a job in the city first,” says Panos Papadopoulos, a former startup founder who now runs Equifund-backed Marathon VC. “Large Greek companies don’t offer progress in skills, salary or prospects. Joining a startup is the best career here.”

The country’s economic woes have been well documented, but a significant milestone is within reach with less than three months until its third bailout programme expires.

Greece has long been plagued by notoriously unfriendly business policies, namely impenetrable red tape. However, according to Stavros Messinis, who co-founded Athens’ first co-working space, The Cube, in 2013, “things are getting easier. You can, for example, register a business online now.

“Traditionally, Greek society has been quite risk-averse. But the generation that is graduating now is changing that.” Projects such as Mindspace, which aims to help students and young graduates transfer their skills and knowledge to the entrepreneurial space, are working to increase this cultural shift – in 2017 its Challenge project resulted in five new companies and 30 jobs.

Messinis also explains that some aspects of Greek culture – such as the fact people often stay living with parents throughout their 20s – are conducive to founding a company. “It gives you the space to play around with different options,” he says.

One of Greece’s much-publicised struggles has been its youth “brain drain”, with about 180,000 graduates leaving the country in the past eight years. But Gatos, who co-founded his first startup, Incrediblue, in 2007 before joining Workable, says the Greek startup ecosystem is benefitting from the skills these talented workers learn overseas – and subsequently bring home. “We’re seeing a lot of Greek founders who have started something abroad setting up subsidiaries or operations here,” he explains.

Papadopoulos is actively working to drive this “brain gain” phenomenon by offering investment to Greek founders living overseas, on the condition they open a subsidiary in the country. According to the European Startup Monitor, 75% of Greek company founders are residents of other countries.

75% of Greek company founders are residents of other countries

Given the impact that both the financial and refugee crises have had on the country, it’s no surprise that one unique aspect of the Athens startup scene is how much it overlaps with the humanitarian space. For example, as well as servicing startups, The Cube also runs a coding school and computer exchange programme for refugees, and Impact Hub Athens is home to a large number of socially-focused enterprises.

Campfire Innovation, which is based at The Cube, is dedicated to helping social enterprises and non-profits communicate, scale and think in a more entrepreneurial way. “We’ve seen so many social projects started not just by Greeks but by international volunteers who have come to help out,” says founder Ioanna Theodorou.

“What we’re trying to avoid is Greece simply becoming a crisis tourism destination, and instead becoming a centre for innovation in the humanitarian space.” What she’d like to see is “some kind of impact funding model [funding based on both economic return and social impact], as that doesn’t exist right now in Greece.”

While there is excitement about the rapid changes taking place in the startup scene, people are cautious about making claims as to how much they will help the overall economy. “Unemployment in the 18-25 age range is still more than 40% – you would need thousands of new companies to make a dent in those metrics,” says Gatos. “There are opportunities being created for good people to advance, but it’s not something Greek society can rely on to solve its issues.”

Another problem is the lack of startup-specific policies, which have worked to turn other European cities into tech hubs. “My biggest complaint [with our system] is that corporate taxes are too high,” Papadopoulos explains. “I would like to see the government offer incentives to those returning to the country.”

However, he is optimistic about the overall outlook for the next few years. “Not everything is going to become high growth, but I think we will see a lot of interesting small companies started by younger people,” he says. “There’s a lot of muscle and a lot of opportunity to make things happen right now.”